Published in The University Bookman, 44 (Autumn, 2005), 57-60.
On
Letters and Essays James
V. Schall, S. J.
THE BACH MOMENT
Recently,
I wandered into Barnes & Noble on ÒMÓ Street in Georgetown intending to
purchase the new Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine. They
did not have it. To save money, if
that is the purpose of life, I should have left at that moment. On the new releases shelf, however, for
only eleven dollars, was J. M. CoetzeeÕs Disgrace, a novel I had heard of and vaguely wanted to
read. Thinking I could get it
later, I proceeded to the upper floors where I found John Paul IIÕs second from
last book, Memory and Identity,
which I did purchase, a remarkable book.
But in the process of looking, I came across CoetzeeÕs Stranger
Shores: Literary Essays. Though I am generally a ÒsuckerÓ for
these sorts of books, what immediately prompted me to buy it was the first
essay in the collection, ÒWhat Is a Classic: A Lecture.Ó I will have to maintain that a lecture
can become an essay when written down.
In any case, the lecture was originally given in Graz, Austria, in 1991. I took the book home and read the
essay right away.
CoetzeeÕs
own South African background serves to provide the framework for this
consideration on the famous question about the nature and character of a Òclassic,Ó
be it in literature, music, or even games. Coetzee, now at the University of Chicago,
begins his considerations by recalling T. S. EliotÕs famous essay, ÒWhat Is a
Classic,Ó a lecture given to the Virgil Society in London in October,
1944. Coetzee notes that Eliot
barely mentioned the war in his lecture, as if to say, as C. S. Lewis said in
his famous essay ÒLearning in War Time,Ó that there are more important things
than wars, even during wars, the chief of which are precisely Òclassics,Ó that
is, reflections on beauty, truth, and what is. Without
these, no one can know what he is fighting for.
CoetzeeÕs
problem in this lecture/essay is to define what a classic is. He is not comfortable with the idea
that a classic has no history. He
points out that many ÒclassicsÓ are not recognized as classics until many
decades or centuries after they are written. The burden of his lecture is to see if the history of a
classicÕs becoming a classic might itself be a factor in discovering what a
classic is. Coetzee is not a
debunker though he takes some pains to examine EliotÕs own relation between his
American background and his British and London literary and personal identity,
wherein he (Eliot) could better associate himself with the great western
classical tradition, particularly with Virgil.
But
what interested me most about this essay was CoetzeeÕs description of how he
arrived at the problem of what is a classic in the first place. It seems that Coetzee was a boy of
fifteen, living in the suburbs of Cape Town in 1955. He was, as are many boys of his age, ÒboredÓ out of his
mind, as he tells us, Òthe main problem of existence in those days.Ó Nothing much was going on. It was a Sunday afternoon (I think of
Johnny CashÕs ÒSunday Morning Coming DownÓ). Young Coetzee had no reason that day to think that anything
much would go on either.
However,
suddenly, from the house next door, Coetzee tells us that he heard some music
that he had never heard of before.
He was not at the time at all musically inclined, still the music
suddenly made him alert. This is
how he describes the moment: ÒAs long as the music lasted, I was frozen. I dared not breathe. I was being spoken to by the music as
music had never spoken to me before.Ó1 His neighbors seem to have been transient
students. He never heard the piece
again though he listened for it.
The music was BachÕs ÒWell-Tempered ClavierÓ played on a harpsichord,
though he did not learn this title till later. ÒAt the age of fifteen, I knew (it) only – in a somewhat suspicions and
even hostile teenage manner – as Ôclassical music.ÕÓ
It
was from this experience that Coetzee later investigated Bach as a Òclassic,Ó
only to find out that Bach was not especially recognized in his own time and
when he was later appreciated it was often for other reasons than his music,
romanticism or German nationalism.
Yet, it seems that there was always a tradition among musicians of
playing and re-playing Bach.
Indeed, music seems to have this requirement built into its very core so
that what is a classic is examined again and again down the ages.
Later
in life, Coetzee examined himself often on this initial experience. Was he moved simply because that is
what ÒclassicsÓ do to us if we read or hear them? Yet, all of us know people who listen to or read classics
who are not moved by them at all. ÒAbout
my response to Bach in 1955, I asked whether it was truly a response to some
inherent quality in the music rather than a symbolic election on my part of
European high culture as a way out of a social and historical dead end.Ó Thus, our love of Bach could be a sort
of snobbishness. In the end,
Coetzee thinks that it really was the music. But the very history of classics, the critique of them even,
is part of what makes them classics.
ÒThe interrogation of the classic, no matter how hostile, is part of the
history of the classic, inevitable and even to be welcomed.Ó2
Yet,
what interested me most in CoetzeeÕs essay/lecture was not so much his social
science ruminations. It was the
raw fact that a human being, even at fifteen – there are people who have fallen in love in every
proper sense at more or less that age, I think of Dante – can see or hear
something that simply changes his life and, perhaps, in changing his life, changes
the world.
This
ÒBack moment,Ó as I now like to call it, reminds me of nothing so much as the
memorable passage in The Confessions
where, at nineteen, in an obscure also African city, Augustine chanced to read
a dialogue of Cicero. Cicero was
another man who knew about and wondered about Òwhat is a classic?Ó On putting the essay down, the young
Augustine burned in his heart and wanted to become a philosopher, even though
Plato said that nineteen is too young to be one. Moments that change lives and the world are like these
experiences of two young African gentlemen who read or hear something that they
never heard of and are ÒfrozenÓ by them.
In
conclusion, there is one other young man whom I like to recall, a young man
who, at a similar moment, did not listen.
This is the Rich Young Man in the Gospels (Matthew 16: 19-22) about whom
John Paul II, both in Veritatis Splendor and Memory and Identity,
speaks with great earnestness.
This young man wanted to know what he had to do to be perfect - a brave question indeed. He was told simply to keep the
commandments. That he had no
problem in doing. He is next told
that if he really wanted to be perfect, he should go, sell what he has, give it
to the poor, and follow the man discoursing with him. We are told the young man was Òrich.Ó At this defining moment in his life,
unlike the men in Cape Town or in Tegaste, he rejected the call. He went away Òsad.Ó We never hear of him again. This too is a ÒclassicÓ scene, not
perhaps of what is truly noble, but of what we are, people who can be presented
with the highest things and not hear them, not see them, not understand them,
or, more likely, not choose them.
Coetzee
tells us, somewhat condescendingly perhaps, that ÒÔWhat Is a Classic?Õ was not
one of EliotÕs best pieces of criticism.Ó3 Yet, when I read CoetzeeÕs
essay/lecture from Graz, what most struck me about it was his very depicting
Thomas Stearns Eliot, lecturing in London, while Òbombs were falling,Ó and
complaining only that, under such unpleasant circumstances, it was difficult to
get the books needed to prepare the said lecture. Somehow, I do think that that wartime moment was, in its own
way, as riveting as BachÕs clavichord.
I do not mean that to lessen the impact of a Bach or a Cicero either on
Coetzee or myself. I simply want
to recall moments that, in a brief instant, define the highest things and our
response to them.
Whenever I put down the book containing AugustineÕs desiring to be a philosopher, I know that moment changed the world. From now on, when I hear the ÒWell-Tempered Clavichord,Ó I shall think of this fifteen year old in Cape Town ÒfrozenÓ outside of himself. Whenever I think of Eliot lecturing to the Virgil Society in London in 1944, not about the war raging about him, but about the classics, what they are, I shall know moments that are, yes, themselves Òclassic.Ó In the end, I shall hope, unlike the Rich Young Man, that, having seen, heard, and been called to these things that take us to the heart of what is, I shall not go away sad.